March 16, 2026

A dbt Pipeline from DynamoDB to Redshift

Migrating from Tableau to dbt on Redshift: What Worked, What Didn’t, and What I Wish I’d Known

Getting data out of DynamoDB, through Redshift, and into something your business can actually use — without losing your mind in the process.

I spent the last couple of years building out a data engineering function from scratch at a small SaaS company. We had a Tableau-based reporting pipeline that involved manual runs, fragile prep flows, and a mounting sense of dread every time someone asked for a new report. I replaced it with dbt, Redshift, and Fivetran, with self-hosted Metabase for business-intelligence, and with a detour through several tools that didn’t work out. Here’s what I learned.

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April 17, 2025

LLMs Are a Tool, Not a Replacement for Thinking

I use LLMs daily. Claude Code is my daily-driver for engineering work and it’s in my IDE terminal constantly. I use Claude Projects for thinking through problems and working through complex decisions. Google’s NotebookLM has become my tool of choice for collecting and summarising research. I use Gemini for image generation. I’ve tried Cursor and Windsurf for IDE-integrated AI, and tend to reach for Cursor on personal projects alongside Claude Code. I’ve had several looks at ChatGPT over the past year and keep finding it less compelling each time.

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January 20, 2024

Htmx - Back to the Server Side

Warning: This post may contain opinions.

I’ve recently got interested in some of the new developments in web development, and in particular, the htmx library. This is a library that allows you to add dynamic behaviour to your web pages, without having to write any Javascript. It feels to the spirit of the web I knew and loved back in the 90s, which was all about hypermedia, and the ability to link between documents.

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December 27, 2023

V2H Part2 - Learning to Use It

Teething Issues

We’ve had our V2H charger a while now, but had a couple of teething problems around a software issue that have made it somewhat hard to figure out the best way to use it. We are one of the limited number of customers who have been given an export limit by the DNO (Distribution Network Operator) telling us how much electricity we are allowed to export to the grid at any time.

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December 27, 2023

Octopus Tariff Comparisons

Changing Tariff

At some point in November, we were experiencing consistently higher prices on Octopus Agile, and I decided to switch tariffs for the rest of the winter at least. Octopus have an “Intelligent Octopus” tariff that charges 7.5p kWh between 11:30pm and 6:00am each day, and around 30p kWh the rest of the time. This tariff is not supported by our V2H charger yet - they specifically say it’s not supported. However, it is supported by our Tesla, so we can safely use the tariff and take advantage of the super cheap rates at night for the V2H charger as well.

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October 19, 2023

Our Vehicle to Home (V2H) Experience - Part 1

Today a nice engineer from ChargedEV called Steve fitted us a V2H charger. This is part of the world’s largest trial of Vehicle-to-Home bidirectional chargers being performed by Indra in the UK.

What’s a V2H Charger?

A conventional EV charger is one way - it takes the electrons from the grid and puts them into your car. A bidirectional charger on the other hand, not only lets you push electrons into your car, but also to pull them out again.

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September 22, 2021

Software Doesn't Solve Social Problems

I listened to the audio book copy of “The Courage To Be Disliked” last year. It’s written as a discussion between a philosopher and a young man, about the concepts of Adlerian psychology, and there’s a great deal of real wisdom there.

One of the key points, is that Adler considered all problems we face as humans, to be issues of interpersonal relationships. The more this is argued in the book, the more it becomes obvious that this is true.

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December 4, 2020

Cory Doctorow And Eco-Consumerism

I really enjoyed this fully-charged podcast and will be reading some Cory Doctorow.

I especially liked the Bruce Sterling quote about the “grandfather problem”. This is the idea that if you can do something less well than your dead grandfather, then it’s probably not the eco-friendly behaviour you really ought to be pursuing.

I think this stems from the idea that we need systemic change in the world, and therefore realistically can’t recycle our way to that future.

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August 1, 2020

Ripple Energy

A very interesting company I heard about this week was a new cooperative in the UK called Ripple Energy. It’s working on the first consumer owned windfarm. The idea is that you can buy shares in the company, and when the farm is built, you will get some of the energy they generate deducted as cost from your electricity bill for the next 25 years. It’s deemed as an alternative to roof top solar. Worth a look.

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June 4, 2020

The History Of Electric Cars - 21st Century

This is the final piece of my three-parter on the history of electric cars. Here, we move up to the present day and the exciting developments that have happened in the last few years, where EVs are close to becoming mainstream.

2003-04

G.M. and DaimlerChrysler sue the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to repeal the ZEV mandate passed in 1990. The Bush Administration joins the suit.

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